Simplify your work and your life by learning the tools and techniques that authors have used to conquered gnarly problem spaces. From avoiding burnout to doing scrappy research on a shoestring budget, you’ll benefit from their experience, avoid making the mistakes they made, and go on to make all new mistakes of your own. (Then contribute your learnings back to us!)
My first experience in improvisational comedy was in 1989. I was a freshman at Texas A&M University. Some of the students in the theater department decided to get an improv troupe started and somehow talked me into joining them. In the beginning, I was petrified to perform without a script. Looking back now, I can see just how much improv has taught me and how it informs the decisions I make when working with a project team to create a
Continue readingImagine if you will information architecture as a pimply-faced, malcontent teenager. IA is eager to express and redefine itself. It wants to be an individual yet accepted by its peers. It is simultaneously aggravated and apathetic about its parents, mentors, and role-models. It is a bit of a mess, but a wonderful, beautiful mess with endless opportunity and potential. The IA Summit (and information architecture) enters adolescence The first IA Summit was held April 8-9, 2000, in Boston, MA, and
Continue readingWhen I was eleven, my parents bought a Mac Plus. It had a tiny monochrome screen, a floppy drive, and 1MB of memory. And it came with something called HyperCard. HyperCard let you make stuff. It had documents called stacks, each a series of cards – similar to PowerPoint today. In addition to graphics and text, you could create buttons and tell them what to do – flip to another card, show or hide an object, and so forth. Down at
Continue readingAt a recent job, my department faced large budget cuts. When the dust had cleared, I found I had become a UX group of one. This didn’t come with a corresponding slowdown in work – in fact, following a major rewrite of our call center application, our department was already struggling to keep pace with a backload of business initiatives. Cuts slashed our BAs, our development group, and our QAs, yet everyone remaining was being asked to speed up. I
Continue readingDid you know usability tests have shown that the maximum number of seconds a user is willing to wait, on average, before abandoning a web page, is 8.6? If that number surprises you, it should. The study took place in 1994. The bar is exponentially higher now for people involved in website user experience design and development when it comes to load speed. Here’s a quick look at the state of affairs. Slow speeds are a real usability challenge. According
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